End-All
by trufflemores
Summary: Barry has a near-death experience and meets two different forms of the Speed Force.


Wake-up.

Barry can't see a thing, but he turns on his heel. Grass hushes underfoot. Thunder crackles in the distance. Who-are-you?

The Flash glows like lightning under his skin. You-know-who-I-am.

Where-are-we?

 _Home._

It is not a voice, but a feeling, and Barry shivers. The lightning materializes in front of him, glowing like a torch in the impenetrable night. With an intense, indefinable joy, it rushes towards a distant rumble of thunder. Alarmingly, darkness closes in behind it, threatening to plunge Barry into the night. With nowhere else to go, Barry can only follow as fast as his legs will carry him as The Flash races headlong towards the other voice.

In some capacity, Barry knows he is being summoned, but he can't detach the pull from The Flash, a magnetic interconnection that calls to them, collectively and independently. Urgency races down his spine. Hurry-hurry-hurry, The Flash chants, straining towards an ever-farther horizon. Hurry-hurry-hurry.

He ages with every step, passing time in a few seconds, then minutes, then hours, days and weeks and years until he is panting and slowing, folding over knees that ache arthritically. Gleefully chasing its own proverbial tail, The Flash continues to surge onward, fading to a pinprick.

Enveloped in utter darkness, Barry feels a clawed hand wrap around his shoulders and under the backs of his knees. The Black Flash lifts him, and Barry can still feel the distant joy of The Flash, and he calls to it, but it does not come home. And then there is a moment when _he_ becomes the lightning, sinking into The Black Flash's skin, and when he opens his eyes they glow white.

To Earth, he returns, and the beasts bow, and the waters retreat, and life itself balks at his presence. The sun is overhead, but when he directs its gaze at it, it dims, a magnificent coronal red, and he reaches up with a clawed hand and seems to hold it between two fingers. Should he ask, the Speed Force would crush it for him. Should he make the request, he could turn Totality into the Void, crushing every shred of multiverse into that gorgeous ubiquitous nothing from which he is from, and where he shall forever return.

But instead they seek out the sick and the weary and before them The Black Flash appears. There is no reaper of mortals, The Black Flash realizes, as he attends to the dying. Most – the overwhelming Most – die alone. But when he can, when he chooses, The Black Flash crouches before them, and reaches out a hand, and silently removes both pain and life from them. He cannot carry them – their souls are too heavy, or perhaps simply too diffuse, not concentrated like his own, attached to that beating-pulsing-heart-of-Speed – so he stands, and walks, and wanders on.

Generations pass – thousands of them – until the Earth is barren, and it tastes like charcoal, and rain, and the end of times. There is no more dirt, nor sea, nor air to breathe, only an echo of what once was. When he walks through forests he has memorized, the very trees he planted have disappeared; the blades of grass no longer sing beneath his steps. When he stares up at the sky, every star he has ever named is still there, but only some are still burning. When he climbs to the highest point on Earth, he stands no higher than the shallowest.

The sun has no hand to hold, but when it dies, he is there, observing from a time After. He knows where the Earthlings are, where they have traveled to, whom they are traveling towards, but he does not follow them. Instead, he closes his eyes and drifts, materializing on that same eternal grassy plain.

The Flash, glowing gold, is standing there.

An identity he has almost but can never forget emerges from that ball of lightning, his own speedster self looking back at him, bright-eyed and day-one-young. He had an identity before the lightning, he knows, but this is who he is, and was, and was always meant to be. He was born on a day lost to perpetuity, but his existence is tied to this creature that was never born and will never die.

The Black Flash reaches out and The Flash bows its head and lets him place a hand on its shoulder.

When Barry opens his eyes, he can see through both of theirs, the white and golden glow. Their ethereal Otherness entangles in him, Life and Death juxtaposed like restless twins. He reaches out and their hands meet, and then he gasps as they separate, heaving a breath of air as his heart beats faster, faster, faster.

Stepping back, The Black Flash walks away, slow, timeless, Seeking, and Barry watches it go. He knows it'll find a new companion, that it will travel the Earth once again, in a new multiverse, in a new eternity.

Standing still, he feels how full The Flash's heart is, how _near_ the thunder is to them. They are the thunder, too, caught up in a wonderful chase, and when he turns in a slow circle he feels The Flash respond, like an old friend and a stranger, too, his eyes, his ears, his beating heart. He reaches out and the grass underneath warms to his touch, straining upwards towards him. He wants to hug it, to hold it, to tell it how much he missed the Earth. He is a rhythm of life that begins and ends with lightning, a spark that Begins before the beginning, and wanders after the End.

Wake-up, The Flash requests, and Barry does.

The first thing he notices is the truly abominable pain in his chest, the next the morning light drifting in through a window. He tilts a head that is heavier than he remembers towards a deep exhalation, smiling when he sees Iris, curled up in a chair. Reaching out, aware of the living warmth in his fingers, the ecstasy of being _alive_ , he settles a hand on her wrist. "Iris," he requests in a voice that is deep and worn and underused. "Wake up."

She yawns and opens her eyes, breathing, " _Barry_ " and sweeping him up into a hug that hurts. "You're – we thought—"

"I'm okay," he tells her, rubbing a hand down her back slowly. Hurting, but healing, too. As long as they remain in juxtaposition, he knows he'll be fine. "What happened?"

"Savitar," Iris replies, sitting back and taking his hand. "We thought – your heart stopped, we couldn't –"

Barry tugs the sheet down his chest, staring the black mark on his chest, right where his heart is. Tracing a wondering hand over it, he feels The Flash's presence there, the Speed Force.

 _Why'd you give me a second chance?_ Barry asks The Flash, nudging it when it doesn't response, but Wally enters the room and he starts to understand.

"Barry," he says, relief and surprise warring in his exhausted expression, a deep score of claw marks on his face, too. There's satisfaction in his glow, his speedster aura a deep, burning red. "You're alive."

"You stopped Savitar," he says.

Wally ducks his head, but his Speed signature gives him away: pure, unadulterated triumph. "We stopped Savitar," he corrects. He steps forward and Barry holds out a hand for him to clasp, which Wally takes, and for a moment, he feels Flash's equal and opposite love for them, philos and agape, a wholeness that lives in threes.

Why-are-we-alive? he needn't ask, for he knows what Flash means.

Because-we-have-somewhere-to-be.


End file.
